Historically, wide area network/local area network (“WAN/LAN”) network functions or functionality have been performed by dedicated hardware in a network interface device (“NID”) or gateway device that is located at the customer location or customer premises. The NID or gateway device comprises a user network interface (“UNI”), which is in essence the demarcation point for the service. Maintaining dedicated NID or gateway deployments requires both firmware and software upgrades, but yields no “bump in the wire” or platform capabilities, and has diminishing value as new services and features emerge that the NID or gateway device cannot support.
Typically also, conventional network access devices—such as conventional residential gateways (“RGs”), conventional business gateways (“BGs”), conventional network interface devices (“NIDs”) or conventional enhanced NIDs (“eNIDs”), conventional optical network terminals (“ONTs”), conventional modems, and/or the like—provide both wide area network (“WAN”) interface and local area network (“LAN”) interface functions at the customer premises. Current standards developing organization (“SDO”) activities are focused on splitting the functionality between physical and virtual components of these access devices. What is not addressed, however, is turning these access devices into devices that can host virtual network functions (“VNFs”). To date, VNFs have only been explored as functions hosted in the service provider network.
Traditionally, the conventional NID translates LAN addresses and provides a gateway function to the WAN at the customer premises. This WAN-to-LAN conversion, which is conducted at the customer premises, results in the “Access” being identified as part of the WAN service (for example, “Internet Access”). Traditionally also, “cloud” services have been located at the Internet Core or on the WAN on the upstream side of the Access, and only associated with the customer as a standalone service. With the WAN/LAN interface functionality located at the customer premises, however, there is limited or no isolation between different services or between different types of services being transmitted to the customer premises over the WAN, which may expose the customer and/or any data being transmitted as part of the services to privacy and/or security issues.
Further, consumers today are very much accustomed to having personalized settings on their devices, including personalized smart phone settings, personalized tablet settings, personalized physical activity tracking settings, personalized computer desktop/laptop settings, etc. In some cases, consumers might also have personalized network settings for their home networks and/or for their work networks. When a customer travels to a different location that is not associated with the customer (e.g., hotel, overseas, friend's house, etc.), the customer might still have access to his or her personalized smart phone settings by bringing his or her smart phone, access to his or her personalized tablet settings by bringing his or her tablet, access to his or her physical activity tracking settings by bringing his or her physical activity tracking device, access to his or her personalized computer desktop/laptop settings by bringing his or her laptop computer, but would conventionally not have access to network settings or network-related settings, or the like, without implementing complicated steps (or at least involving significant user input) to establish virtual private networks or the like.
Moreover, conventional networks and network service providers do not provide the user (or subscriber of network services) with control of his or her own network or network service with the network service provider, much less a user-interactive user or customer portal that allows the user to request changes to the network configuration of the user's network or the network associated with the service provider that affects the user, which automatically causes changes to the network and/or the network configuration accordingly.
Hence, there is a need for more robust and scalable solutions for implementing network configuration, and, in particular embodiments, to methods, systems, apparatus, and computer software for implementing customer control point or customer portal for enabling customer-based virtualized platform and network configuration.